The main reasons that some of our producers were not strong believers in organic certification is that, for them, certification is both expensive and hard in terms of record keeping and bureaucracy.

P13 felt that “it is such an extra headache, we‘d have to hire someone to be in charge of certification.” P10 said that, “I know that a lot of organic farmers talk about how it’s  this big pain, all the record keeping.” He elaborated, saying, “I think that there is some room for wrong interpretation of the requirements and some farmers keep records in different ways than others and some probably make them up.” Even P3 who was certified said that “It's a death sentence growing organic, it can be very frustrating."

P12 explained that he was not certified organic for various reasons. For his vineyards he said “You know how much that would cost? It’s just not sustainable.” On the other hand, for his pastures he said, “I could be on my pastures and I went to the [organic certification] people to start that process a couple years ago, but they were too busy.”

Additionally, he raises numerous animals and explained the struggles he would face if he tried to get organic certification for them:

“It would be virtually impossible to get organic feed for rabbits. It would be extremely cost prohibitive. Even to get certified organic rabbit meat you have to have the processing plant be certified organic. For the pigs you have to have all the feed be organic and it’s not organic. Plus again I’d have to get certified organic on the slaughter. So the animals are extremely difficult.”

These producers' feelings are best echoed through the words of P8: ”Sustainability wasn’t really my main focus in the beginning but now it is our primary focus, to figure out what that means. Really a challenge. Easy thing to say. Hard to Do.”